Enough of that, then. The board of directors at server and services company Unisys has come to the conclusion that Joe McGrath, its president and chief executive officer since 2005, is not the right guy to lead the company forward. And as such, Unisys has begun a search for a new CEO.
McGrath agreed to step down effective at …

Well, they have had opportunities

I think they should have given away Mapper to college students starting a long time ago to get them hooked on using a really nice piece of 4GL. Since it's not free, I wish I could afford to buy the dev version.

3D visible enterprise

Who does understand IT?

It is not so much that Buffett doesn't understand IT it is more no one understands the IT market.

And IT is very odd, the truth of the matter is those with the knowledge should be racking it in, and there really shouldn't be large IT companies, staffed with any management, it makes no rational sense. You hire someone to manage your IT be it in development or administration, and then you hire people to manage the people managing the machines, duh that is just crazy and of course uneconomical.

IT is just rife with the problem of over management, so when you value an IT company, it just looks like it is over staffed and there is far too much fat in there.

But here is the rub, when you start to remove the fat from an IT company, the managers create problems, in effect a lot of them low hack the company. People talk about logic bombs but really you have more to fear from non technical management deliberately putting a spanner in the works, then you do from the underpaid and undervalued tech lot. They jsut have more time on their hands to create problems as they are not really not doing any work for the main part.

So, yeah tech companies are just terrible to invest in, none of it makes sense, more sense to invest in companies with another focus that uses tech wisely. Those are the best tech gigs really, and that is where the innovation is happening, tech there normally manages themselves with a seat on the board.

If you are bringing in outside tech for a project, then only a fool hires the big boys, your project just won't see the light of day and will suffer from over management which stifles the effectiveness of the project.

As the cost of hardware components drop, and open source visibility increases that trend is only set to increase. It is like mercenaries and the western armies, most mercenaries can handle the regulars; they are just better, and free of the chain of command to select the most effective solution.

A portfolio heavy in tech stocks is a high risk portfolio in my opinion. Much better to identify the company in a market sector that makes use of tech in the most cost effective and innovative way and invest there, then it is to invest in what are just brands names really, there is no knowledge in tech companies beyond the tech staff and they are transient.

Take Google for example, what stops others creating a better search engine; well really it is just hardware costs and bandwidth, both of those are either set to drop in price or increase in capacity, when that happens others will just create their own search engines and the market will be strewn with them, and Google will be no more. That is how easy it is to go from number one to number 300 in an afternoon in IT :)